Douglas Hofstadter:What Do We Mean When We Say "I"?

What Do We Mean When We Say "I"?

Douglas Hofstadter has a vivid recollection of a pig's head on a table in a market. As a teenager he could see the severed neck that once had lines of communication with the body, that had once connected all the outposts of information with the headquarters in consciousness. He asked, "Who once had been in that head? Who had lived there?

Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, Consciousness, & Linguistic Place Holders*

Born in Czechoslovakia, in 1931 Kurt Gödel demonstrated that some propositions could not be mathematically proven true or false using the rules and axioms within a given mathematical system. Outside it, the system could be proved or disproved, but by doing so you would only create a larger system with its own unprovable statements.

So what?, you ask. Only this.

Of Selves and Cars

In the 1 January 2006 article below, John Allen Paulos asserts that a major shift in society and culture would occur once the public widely understood that the self is non-existent. That is one view of the self. Only one.

The Self Is A Conceptual Chimera

John Allen Paulos says this about the self: "Doubt that a supernatural being exists is banal, but the more radical doubt that we exist, at least as anything more than nominal, marginally integrated entities having convenient labels like "Myrtle" and "Oscar," is my candidate for Dangerous Idea.

Non-Duality’s No-Self and Antonio Damasio

Non-Duality’s No-Self and Antonio Damasio

Non-Duality is the term for a view of the world as not two, but one—not the duality of a person and the world outside him or her, but instead a subjective experience in which the perceiver and the perceived participate with one another in a sense, according to some experiencers, that all is part of incessant movement, a dance, so to speak.

David Chalmers’ Hard Problem of Consciousness

Although called the father of modern philosophy, René Descartes became challenged in the last century for the split he created between body and mind, the mind-body dualism, or subject and object. For him, body became one thing; mind, another. This presents a problem. Why? Hold out your hand. Open the fist. Now close it. How did the gap get bridged between your hand, the object, and mind, the subject, if the two are split?

Benjamin Libet's Personal View of Free Will

"If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was travelling its way of its own accord on the strength of a resolution taken once and for all.

Leaps of Faith

St Augustine said, "I believe because it is absurd." William James, Charles Sanders Pierce, and Miguel Unamuno, among many others, held that the abandonment of reason is acceptable under certain circumstances. Such a situation is allowable when an issue is of extreme importance to human existence and when rational or empirical evidence is inconclusive one way or the other. These philosophers held that such a position is also acceptable regarding the free will/determinism issue, although the preponderance of scientific evidence weighs in for determinism despite our sense of free will and decision. Former Scientific American editor, Martin Gardner takes this view with regard to his belief in God. (Among his books are The Ambidextrous Universe, Weird Water & Fuzzy Logic, The Annotated Alice, The Emperor's New Mind, and Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries?)

Free Will & Consciousness Research: W. Grey Walter, Benjamin Libet, Hans Kornhuber, Lüder Deeke, and Risto Näätäen

Benjamin Libet is most frequently associated with the Readiness Potential and its implications for free will, but W. Grey Walter (1910-1977), did pioneering work that brought early attention to the phenomenon in Britain and America, although similar findings had been made in Germany and later in Finland.


W. Grey Walter: Background
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, he lived in England from the age of five, and became interested in neurophysiology at King's College, Cambridge.

Wilder Penfield, Brain Maps, V.S. Ramachandran and Phantom Orgasms: The Man Who Mistook His Foot For A Penis

Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield performed pioneering experiments in the 1940s and 1950s. During extensive brain surgeries, he applied electrodes to different regions of the brain and stimulated them. He then asked patients what they felt.